CCATDP’s Heather Beaudoin was recently featured by Evangelical Focus to discuss the Christian case against the death penalty and to highlight the National Association of Evanglicals’ official shift away from the supporting capital punishment. Heather explained,

I have certainly witnessed a shift away from the death penalty in the evangelical community. Individuals in the evangelical community have shown that they know the facts about our broken death penalty system. Regardless of whether or not we support it philosophically, we see that we cannot stand by a system that sentences innocent people to death, displays such rampant racial and economic disparities, puts murder victims’ families through years of uncertainty, and drains local resources.

She also noted,

I think that evangelicals and the secular society have come to the issue for different reasons. Evangelicals have the Bible to deal with. I sometimes hear evangelicals say that they support the death penalty because it is Biblical. In my experience, this is the main reason given by evangelicals who continue to back capital punishment. We are able to find common ground when we look at the Biblical death penalty and compare it to the system we have in place in America. They look nothing alike. The death penalty in the Bible has many mandates – including the fact that there must be two eyewitnesses in order to apply the death penalty, and that you cannot execute someone solely on the basis of circumstantial evidence. There are over 40 mandates that the Bible lays out that the American death penalty disregards. For this reason, we are able to discuss how the death penalty is currently functioning – the ways in which it is broken beyond repair.